This year's symposium topic is "Challenges for Monetary Policy," and for the Federal Reserve those challenges flow from our mandate to foster maximum employment and price stability. From this perspective, our economy is now in a favorable place, and I will describe how we are working to sustain these conditions in the face of significant risks we have been monitoring. The current U.S. expansion has entered its 11th year and is now the longest on record.1 The unemployment rate has fallen steadily throughout the expansion and has been near half-century lows since early 2018. But that rate alone does not fully capture the benefits of this historically strong job market. Labor force participation by people in their prime working years has been rising. While unemployment for minorities generally remains higher than for the workforce as a whole, the rate for African Americans, at 6 percent, is the lowest since the government began tracking it in 1972. For the past few years, wages have been increasing the most for people at the lower end of the wage scale. People who live and work in low- and middle-income communities tell us that this job market is the best anyone can recall. We increasingly hear reports that employers are training workers who lack required skills, adapting jobs to the needs of employees with family responsibilities, and offering second chances to people who need one. Inflation has been surprisingly stable during the expansion: not falling much when the economy was weak and not rising much as the expansion gained strength. Inflation ran close to our symm tweet at 10:00am: POWELL SAYS INFLATION SEEMS TO BE MOVING CLOSER TO 2% GOAL tweet at 10:01am: Powell: -#Fed will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion -Economy in favorable place but faces significant risks tweet at 10:02am: POWELL: WE'VE SEEN FURTHER EVIDENCE OF A GLOBAL SLOWDOWNPowell says there’s no ‘rulebook’ for trade war, pledges to ‘act as appropriate’ to sustain economy Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell repeated his pledge Friday to keep the economic expansion going while acknowledging that tariffs and other factors are causing growth to slow. In his annual remarks at the central bank’s Jackson Hole symposium, Powell offered little in the way of guidance on where he thinks rates should go, saying that the Fed “will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion,” a phrase he has used several times in the recent past. Looking at the Fed’s dual mandate of full employment and price stability, Powell said the “economy is close to both goals. “Our challenge now is to do what monetary policy can do to sustain the expansion so that the benefits of the strong jobs market extend to more of those still left behind, and so that inflation is centered firmly around 2 percent.” He also outlined the challenges the Fed faces and indicated that for he and his fellow officials there are “no recent precedents to guide any policy response to the current situation.” “While monetary policy is a powerful tool that works to support consumer spending, business investment, and public confidence, it cannot provide a settled rulebook for international trade,” he said in prepared remarks. “We can, however, try to look through what may be passing events, focus on how trade developments are affecting the outlook, and adjust policy to promote our objectives.” Powell painted a mostly positive picture on the U.S. economy, saying it has “continued to perform well overall” while facing challenges. “The global growth outlook has been deteriorating since the middle of last year. Trade policy uncertainty seems to be playing

tweet at 10:59am: Our Country has lost, stupidly, Trillions of Dollars with China over many years. They have stolen our Intellectual Property at a rate of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year, & they want to continue. I won’t let that happen! We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far.... tweet at 10:59am: ....better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing.. tweet at 10:59am: ....your companies HOME and making your products in the USA. I will be responding to China’s Tariffs this afternoon. This is a GREAT opportunity for the United States. Also, I am ordering all carriers, including Fed Ex, Amazon, UPS and the Post Office, to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE,.... tweet at 10:59am: ....all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!). Fentanyl kills 100,000 Americans a year. President Xi said this would stop - it didn’t. Our Economy, because of our gains in the last 2 1/2 years, is MUCH larger than that of China. We will keep it that way!

tweet at 11:13am: #UK's Johnson plays down hopes of a quick #Brexit deal: Lest we forget this ongoing saga while $GBP rallies.